Steve Jobs has created a consumer society that makes many of us sad because we don't have the latest iPhone, said the UK's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Speaking at an interfaith gathering attended by the Queen, Sacks compared the iPad to the tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountains.

In case you have been living under a rock for the past month or so, we are in the middle of a hard drive shortage. Now that we can’t simply add more drives at will, storage utilisation has suddenly become important again.

While “vacuum fluctuations” – one of the stranger predictions of quantum physics – have been observed for some time, a team comprising scientists from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the University of University of New South Wales have gone one step further, creating their own photons out of empty space.

Adoption of Microsoft SharePoint is growing rapidly, with Microsoft reporting “double-digit growth” in its latest financials, yet it remains widely misunderstood. What can you do with SharePoint, what is the difference between the free SharePoint Foundation and the full product, and what are the pros and cons?

Nokia has undergone a dramatic convulsion this year, abandoning its two smartphone software platforms, and allying itself with Microsoft. The company’s software was widely seen as uncompetitive, and hadn’t moved with the demands of the market. Nokia has also missed out on the most explosive hardware growth area in recent years. As the company put it, in regulatory filings made this year:

There’s been a rash of activity from RIM recently, with a range of subtly different BlackBerry models designed to appeal to different segments of the smart phone market. The Curve 9360 is towards the budget end but still packs in a full Qwerty hard keyboard, 5Mp camera and the latest version of BlackBerry’s OS.

Google's open-source program manager has launched an entertaining rant against firms offering mobile security software, accusing them of selling worthless software and of being "charlatans and scammers".

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has labelled the public sector's old way of procuring IT products as a "speed dating approach" and added that UK.gov needed to learn from its European neighbours such as Germany and France.

Ahead of the SC11 supercomputer conference in Seattle last week, recently awakened supercomputing giant Fujitsu rolled out the kicker: a commercialized version of the K supercomputer that is at the top of the flops charts in the world right now.

PC shortages are affecting the UK earlier than expected but the rapid swing from inventory overload to relative hardware famine has led to some customers dismissing resellers' warnings as sales opportunism.

If you're thinking of plopping down a brace of Benjamins for a 7-inch Kindle Fire this holiday season, you might think of waiting a couple of months for the 8.9-inch version, which looks increasingly likely to be released next spring.

Advanced Micro Devices is currently winning the core count battle in the x86 server-chip war with the just-announced and now shipping "Interlagos" Opteron 6200s, which cram 16 cores into a big fat G34 socket. That's the same G34 socket that the prior generation Opteron 6100s used, so adopting the new chip is a snap for those server makers who did Opteron 6100 boxes. Ditto for the forthcoming Opteron 4200s, which plug into the existing C32 sockets.

The legal spat between Itanium system maker HP and software and now systems maker Oracle has heated back up, with Oracle filing papers in California's Superior Court alleging that HP was paying Intel to keep the Itanium processor alive.

A team of 68 scientists led by the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy claims to have refuted the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino result, even as the OPERA researchers are generating a new buzz by releasing their newer, more-finely-calibrated short-pulse tests that seem to confirm their original statement.